Monday, 6 August 2012

Album Review: Antony and the Johnsons, Cut the World

Cut the World, Rough Trade Records,
out now

Cut the
World is the newest album from
Antony and the Johnsons, which really just means Antony Hegarty, a strange and
wonderful man, accompanied by a live orchestra. This isn’t an album of new
songs, though; there’s only one new track on it, the perfectly serviceable
title song Cut the World, along with
one spoken piece which… well, we’ll get to that later. The other ten tracks are
old songs, reworked and set to new, orchestral arrangements.

2005's I Am A Bird Now

My favourite Antony and the Johnsons songs are all
early, from their eponymous debut album and I
Am A Bird Now-era. (Bird Gerhlis one of my all-time favourite
songs.) The later albums, Swanlights
and The Crying Light, are much less
interesting and emotional. They had much less impact for me; I didn’t much like
the words, the subject matter, the arranging or the way Antony used his voice.
This made listening to this album kind of a weird experience; I was more
excited to hear the older songs, like Cripple
and the Starfish, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy and Rapture, again, but they needed updating less, and had a pretty
complex musical backing to start with, making the changes seem unnecessary. I
was less interested for the newer songs, like Swanlights and Kiss My Name,
since I didn’t enjoy them the first time round, but while they still don’t blow
me away, the new arrangements have made them much more enjoyable and made a
much bigger improvement. The orchestral arrangements really help the newer
songs, recalling some of the power and depth that the classical instruments
contrasting with Antony’s unique voice brought to the earliest songs, although Cripple and the Starfish really suffers
from the buried string solo and the lack of the spectacular saxophone that
really makes the original version.

As best I can tell, this is a picture of the Danish National
Chamber Orchestra, which plays the accompaniment
for Cut the World

Antony’s unusual voice is in great shape on this
album. His heartbreaking falsetto wail is most effective in small doses, but on
the last couple of albums it’s been overused. Here, if anything, it’s a little
underdone, but an incredible instrument for conveying melancholy.

The songs on this album are good and worth
listening to if you don’t already know them, but honestly, I don’t quite see
what the point of the album is. The new arrangements don’t make a substantial
difference to any of the songs, really; they aren’t transformed into anything
new. It’s missing too many obviously better songs to serve as a Greatest Hits (Hope There’s Someone, anybody?), and
feels pretty self-indulgent – the boring Swanlights
meanders on for nearly 7 and a half minutes, which is 4 minutes too long. It’s
enjoyable, but if you already have the original versions of the songs, just
listen to those. In fact, it feels to me like the whole album is just a vehicle
for the second track, a spoken recording called Future Feminism.

Ugh, okay. I guess I can’t put it
off any longer. Let’s talk about that mess.

Future
Feminism is a live recording of Antony speaking about… stuff. I read it
described as his feminist, transgender, religious manifesto. You have no idea
how hyped I got when I heard about it. Answer: really hyped. It sounded like
brilliance that was going to be insightful, interesting, meaningful, important.
But oh man was I wrong about that. Future
Feminism is a barely coherent, badly thought out, rambling mess of New Age
nonsense, gender absolutism, idolisation of ‘femininity’ and meaningless buzz
phrases that should never have made it out into the public.

Antony: never going to
be a politician

For starters, Antony is apparently a
horrible public speaker. The recording is full of nervous breaths, awkward
pauses, uncomfortable laughing, and incessant uptalking. Barely a sentence
escapes his lips without being turned into a question. Also, it sounds to me
like he had planned out his speech in advance, but didn’t have it written it down
in front of him. There are weird topic jumps and logic gaps. There’s no
explanation of his buzz phrases like “feminine systems of governance”, and
weirdly, no analysis or criticism of the system of absolute gender binaries.
Antony seems keen to simply replace a patriarchal system with a matriarchal
one, but gives no explanation to suggest what that means in terms of social and
environmental relations. I’d hoped to use his speech to discuss my ideas of
feminism and a feminist future, but although the track is called Future Feminism, the word "feminism" appears in it not once. Instead, there is a lot of use of "feminine" and "femininity", which is

not at all the same thing. Antony appears to be working
from a misunderstanding of the notion of feminism; in my opinion, feminism does
not mean trying to replace the “masculine” with the “feminine”, but actually
means encouraging people to stop
believing that there has to be a difference between what is “masculine” and
what is “feminine”. In fact, the viewpoint from which Antony is working and
my own are so at odds that I don’t really have a way to critique his points.

I’ll give him this: I’m sure that
Antony is a very intelligent and thoughtful man and that his views are the
result of a long process of observation, refinement, self-understanding and
trying to find a way to fit into a world in which he clearly feels an outsider.
I saw a glimpse of some very interesting points in there, particular
surrounding the transgender and the “patriarchal monotheistic” religion issues.
But this was not the way to express them. If he truly wanted to create a
manifesto for a “feminist” future, he needed to think this out and write it
down clearly. It would probably be fascinating. This, though – over seven and a
half minutes in which he says precisely nothing – is just an embarrassment.
I’ll leave you some quotations and some thoughts of my own:

I’ve been thinking all day about the moon. Like, is
it an accident that women menstruate once a month and the moon comes once a
month?

Oh, great.

It’s a known fact in mental health that people are
more excitable around the full moon. And what about the fact that we’re 70%
made of water? And the whole ocean reacts to the full moon, right?... If we’re
70% water, I must be having some homeopathic relationship with the changing
cycles of the moon.

I
don’t think that homeopathic means what you think it means. Also. Gravity: it’s
not magic.

In patriarchal monotheisms we all worship a god
elsewhere, who has a plan for us in a paradise elsewhere after we die.

But I’m a witch? I actually de-baptised myself?

What’s great about being transgender is that you’re
born with a natural religion… you’re almost automatically a witch. None of the
patriarchal monotheisms will have you.

Transgender
people are automatically witches. Um… okay. That actually sounds like something
a conservative patriarchal monotheistic religion would say itself.

I’m worried that the ecology of the world is
collapsing, and I won’t have anywhere to be reborn. Because I’m like, where are
any of us going? Where have any of us ever gone?

Did you know that whales were once land-roaming
mammals? And then they crawled back into the ocean, trying to find something to
eat? And eventually they got rid of their hands and legs?

Uhh…
I don’t think that that’s quite how it happened.

It’s a very indigenous idea that the earth is a
female, that the earth menstruates, that the water of the world is the blood of
the woman’s body, and that’s what we crawled out of, in the same way that we
crawled out of our mother’s wombs.

Indigenous?
Really? I’m not sure what he means by that. Either he means innate, like, we’re born thinking the
earth is our mother, or indigenous as in that belief is common to the religions
of indigenous peoples, which is kind of true, but it doesn’t really sound like
he’s done his research and can provide thorough and culturally sensitive
examples. Anthropology!

I truly believe that unless we move into feminine
systems of governance, we don’t have a chance on this planet.

Feminine
systems of governance. You want to tell us what those are like, Antony? No, he
doesn’t. My question: what is wrong with just saying “better” systems of
governance? More considerate of the environment, more people-focused, more
caring, more thoughtful, more whatever the hell he means by “feminine”? Why
does everything have to be broken down into meaningless arbitrary conservative
absolute gender binaries? Just because he’s saying “feminine” is better doesn’t
make it any less problematic.

Here’s the thing: the idea that
abstract things, like systems of government, character traits and activities
can be somehow either “masculine” or “feminine” is a product of the patriarchy. Wanting to replace the “masculine”
with the “feminine” is just another form of the same hegemonic system.
(Cultural hegemony: roughly, it means the social system imposed by a dominating
class that is bought into by the subjugated class willingly or without the use
of force by the dominating class. In this case, the hegemony imposed by the
patriarchy is the idea that “masculinity” and “femininity” are fundamentally
different and belong in a dichotomous binary, and most people, including those
in oppressed groups like women and trans people, pretty much believe this and
don’t think about it too hard.) Moving beyond the gender hierarchy of the
patriarchal system means accepting what to me appears to be the fundamental
principle of feminism: not that “masculinity” and “femininity” or “male” and
“female” are equal, but that, except
for penises and vaginas, there is
basically no difference at all between them.

Ugh, of course Sarah Palin exists, but don’t bother
me with that. But Sarah Palin is working very much within patriarchal systems.

It
is obligatory to mention Sarah Palin whenever you say anything about women in
government.

Final verdict: I’m gonna give this album a 5/10. It’s got some enjoyable updates of good songs and is pleasant
to listen to. The musical accompaniments are stunning, his voice sounds great.
I can’t forgive the problematic logicless disaster of Future Feminism though. I’m knocking off two full points for that,
which is sad, because I would really want to give a spoken word feminist,
transgender manifesto called Future
Feminism like a billion extra points. But no. Seriously, if you get this
album, just skip track 2. You will be much happier for it.